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After recent years of record or near-record runs and harvests, Bristol Bay sockeye salmon numbers are expected to return to more average levels next year, according to state biologists. The 2024 Bristol Bay sockeye salmon run is expected to total 39 million fish, with a predicted range between about 25 million and 53 million fish, according to a preliminary forecast released Nov. 3 by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. That is 35% lower than the average over the past 10 years but 6% higher than the long-term average for Bristol Bay, the...
For the team aboard the Okeanos Explorer off the coast of Alaska, exploring the mounds and craters of the sea floor along the Aleutian Islands was a chance to surface new knowledge about life in some of the world's deepest and most remote waters. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel went out on a five-month mission this summer and fall with a reconfigured former Navy vessel run by civilians and members of the NOAA Corps. The ship, with a 48-member crew, was...
A federal judge in Anchorage has ruled that U.S. government officials did not overstep the law when they allowed an emergency hunt near Kake during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision, published Nov. 3 by Judge Sharon Gleason, is the latest chapter in a long-running dispute between the state and federal officials over who has the authority to regulate subsistence hunting and fishing on public lands in Alaska. Gleason is also overseeing a separate but unrelated lawsuit by the federal government against the state over...
A federal judge has upheld the Biden administration’s approval of ConocoPhillips’ $8 billion Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope, a decision that environmental groups swiftly vowed to fight. U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason rejected requests by a grassroots Iñupiat group and environmentalists to vacate the project approval. She dismissed their claims against Willow, which is in the federally designated National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The administration’s approval of Willow in March drew the ire of environmentalists who accused...
More than a year after the state Department of Public Assistance first fell behind with processing food stamps benefits for thousands of Alaskans, the agency is again reporting lengthy delays for new and returning applicants. As of late last month, about 6,000 Alaskans who had applied for benefits this summer and fall were waiting on critical food aid from the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which in Alaska are processed and distributed by the Alaska Division of Public Assistance. The new backlog was created...
The title translates to "orphan" in English, but people celebrating the release of the Lingít-language children's book "Kuhaantí" emphasized the project is very much a multigenerational family effort by the Southeast Alaska Native community. "Kuhaantí" is intended to be the first of nine books and animated videos produced during the next two years sharing tribal stories in their Native language, the first publications of their kind in decades, according to officials involved with the pr...
Now in its 15th year, the applied fisheries program at the University of Alaska Southeast draws students from across the state and across the country. Not just ocean states like Florida, but the Great Lakes state of Wisconsin, and even landlocked Wyoming and Kentucky this semester. “Our enrollment has been increasing,” said assistant professor Lauren Wild, who has taught in the program since 2020. Students attend online or, she said, if they live in an area without adequate and reliable high-speed internet service, the school will send the...
Alaska fish-harvesting employment declined in 2022, a continuing yearslong slide caused by a variety of factors, according to an analysis by the state Department of Labor. Employment for people harvesting seafood dropped by about 25% from 2015 to 2022, according to the analysis, published in the November issue of Alaska Economic Trends, the department’s monthly research magazine. The industry lost ground compared to other sectors of the Alaska economy, the analysis found. Seafood harvesting accounted for 7.3% of Alaska jobs in July of 2021, b...
Chum salmon are now reproducing farther north in some North Slope rivers, researchers have confirmed. A University of Alaska Fairbanks team this fall found about 100 chum salmon that were spawning or had just spawned in the Anaktuvuk and Itkillik rivers. The rivers are tributaries of the Colville River, which flows into the Arctic Ocean. The discovery of salmon that far north was not a surprise since all five species of Alaska salmon have been spotted in the Arctic, said Peter Westley, an associate professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and O...
The state has begun a sweeping analysis of its employees’ salaries to determine whether poor pay is contributing to ongoing hiring woes. The Alaska Department of Administration published a request for proposals, seeking a contractor to perform a comparison between state pay in Alaska, pay in the private sector and pay among other governments. The comparison will include 404 different job classes, including positions as varied as prison guards, archaeologists, ferry workers, tax auditors, and the people in charge of regulating the accuracy of g...
PORTLAND, Maine — The last wild Atlantic salmon that return to U.S. rivers have had their most productive year in more than a decade, raising hopes they may be weathering myriad ecological threats. Officials counted more than 1,500 salmon in the Penobscot River in Maine, home to the country’s largest run of Atlantic salmon, state data show. That is the most since 2011, when researchers counted about 2,900. The salmon were once abundant in American rivers, but factors such as overfishing, loss of habitat and pollution reduced their pop...
Nearly every Alaskan received a $1,312 payment last month, their annual share from the earnings of the state’s nest-egg oil fund. Some use the money for extras like vacations but others — particularly in high-cost rural Alaska where jobs and housing are limited — rely on it for home heating fuel or snowmachines that are critical for transportation. The unique-to-Alaska payment has become a blessing and a curse in a state that for decades has ridden the boom-and-bust cycle of oil, and the annual Permanent Fund dividend now competes for fundi...
Vic Fischer, the last living signer of the Alaska Constitution and active in progressive state politics for seven decades, died Oct. 22 at age 99. His death came after several years of declining health and an extended stay in hospice care. Born May 4, 1924, in Berlin, Germany, to an American father and Latvian mother, his family rotated between the Soviet Union and Germany, leaving the latter country for good after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. As Josef Stalin’s purges took hold in the Soviet Union, Fischer’s father, journalist Louis Fischer...
The state has approved new regulations on inexpensive cannabis-like products derived from hemp, sometimes referred to as “diet weed.” The new changes mean intoxicating hemp-derived products will have to be regulated by the state’s marijuana control board, an act that will see them removed from vape shops and other unregulated stores across the state. Some nonintoxicating products will also be affected by the changes. So-called “full-spectrum” hemp products intended to help with epilepsy and pain include a variety of cannabinoids, including...
Former President Jimmy Carter was honored Nov. 1 by the Alaska Wilderness League for his conservation work in the state. The Mardie Murie Lifetime Achievement Award recognized Carter’s role in creating and passing the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. “Alaska is a special place for many Americans, and President Carter was ahead of his time in understanding how protecting wild Alaska would outlive his White House tenure,” Kristen Miller, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. “We honor and celebrate...
The smell of cedar and the sounds of singing filled the garden behind the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage during the raising of a totem pole that symbolizes healing from the boarding school era decades ago. More than 600 people gathered on Oct. 22 for the ceremony, raising Alaska's first totem pole dedicated to Alaska Natives who attended boarding schools operated by the federal government or religious orders, as well as their descendants and those who died during their time there....
For the next week, Alaskans have a chance to register their opinions on the future of the state ferry system through an online survey that will be used to help create a long-range plan. The survey responses will be used over the next year to craft the “2045 Long-Range Plan” for the Alaska Marine Highway System, intended to establish its goals for service levels and operations beyond the more reactive, short-term decisions that have guided the system in recent years. AMHS General Manager Craig Tornga opened an Oct. 24 public meeting by des...
PORT ANGELES, Wash. - Alaskan Jeanette Kiokun, the tribal clerk for the Qutekcak Native Tribe in Seward, Alaska, didn't immediately recognize the shriveled, brown plant she found on the shore of the Salish Sea off the Washington state coast or other plants that were sunburned during the long, hot summer. But a fellow student at a weeklong tribal climate camp did. They are rosehips, traditionally used in teas and baths by the Skokomish Indian Tribe in Washington state and other tribes. "It's getting too hot, too quick," Alisa Smith Woodruff, a...
Staff for Gov. Mike Dunleavy quashed the publication of a new Department of Labor report examining the competitiveness of teacher pay in Alaska, an act that current and former staff say could damage the apolitical reputation of the division that publishes state economic data. “This is data that typically is available to the public, and it’s never good to suppress good, objective data,” said Neal Fried, who retired in July after almost 45 years as an economist with the department. The report, which had been the cover article in this month’s edit...
Alaska’s industrial development agency has sued the Biden administration in an attempt to revive its Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas leases. The lawsuit filed Oct. 18 by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority alleges that the Department of the Interior violated federal laws and its own regulations when it canceled the leases last month. Interior’s actions were politically motivated and illegally deprived AIDEA and the state of the economic benefits that would come from drilling in the refuge’s coastal plain, an area...
The city of Whale Pass in Southeast Alaska doesn’t have much: a few dozen residents, a road, a school and a few lodges, among other businesses. But what it does have is a lot of trees. The town, nestled in a cove on the north end of Prince of Wales Island, about 40 air miles southwest of Wrangell, has been the site of logging camps since the 1960s. Like the rest of Southeast, it’s within the Tongass National Forest, the United States’ largest national forest. Now, Whale Pass residents are fighting a pending state timber sale in their town,...
A couple of Sitka teens have pleaded guilty to charges in connection with the illegal killing of bears on a road north of town last fall and will forfeit their hunting rights temporarily, pay fines and lose the firearms and gear used in the violations. Peter Holst and Bae Barkhoefer were 16 years old at the time of the offenses but were prosecuted as adults, as is allowed under state law for fish and game violations. Barkhoefer took part in only the first of the two bear killings to which Holst pleaded guilty. The state charged that on Sept....
The last of this year’s record of 1,646,862 cruise ship passengers left Juneau on Oct. 25. It was dark, temperatures were below freezing and a steady wind was blowing. All of which suited Shane Carl, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, just fine. “I wanted to experience cold,” he said. “I knew it would be cold because the summers I hear are warmish, I heard. And I wanted to see the northern lights. But also the prices were great. It was toward the end of the season and I knew there’d be a lot of sales. And it did not disappoint.” The 1,936-passenger N...
As demand for seafood grows, including across Indiana, a remote farm is harvesting thousands of pounds of salmon every year — on land. But the genetically modified fish teeming in the Albany, Indiana, tanks are continuing to draw pushback from environmental advocates who say the “Frankenfish” threaten local ecosystems and are not a sustainable food source. Engineered by biotech company AquaBounty Technologies, the “AquAdvantage” salmon is the first such altered animal to be cleared for human consumption in the United States. A boycott a...
Bystanders watched through the windows of Petersburg IGA as wildlife troopers and police captured a young bear inside the grocery store on Oct. 17. Authorities later killed the orphaned bear, which they said was unlikely to survive the winter. Alaska State Wildlife Troopers Josh Spann and Sgt. Cody Litster tried to push the bear out the door, hoping to get it back into a wooded lot and on its own again. However, “it was starting to create more problems and a spectacle,” Litster said. “A dog catcher’s pole was used. It was brought out across...